Evening Discourse: Turning your Read Later list into a Listen Later
When I have some free time on the weekends, I’ll try to pull an article I’ve saved in Instapaper and read it. While Feedly is great for publications I read regularly, I do want to read a lot of articles that shared on social media.
But when do I have the time? It’s hard. But when I’m at the park or on transit I do put on a podcast and I get through my podcast queue effectively because I don’t need to sit down and stare at my phone during that time.
The Instapaper app on my phone does have a text-to-speech feature, but it doesn’t work well. The audio quality is subpar, it doesn’t let me queue up several articles together, and it doesn’t interface with the phone’s standard media controller.
Still, I really wanted a way to get a stellar audio listening experience. In the past I built Quillcast as a way for writers to turn their own content into podcasts. Could I do the same for reading?
Introducing the Evening Discourse
There’s regularly drama on Twitter and there will be articles shared about the current discourse. But I really don’t have time to obsess over the minutia of this drama during the workday. I wanted a way to save articles over the course of the day so that on my commute in the evening I could follow along to all the schenanigans as a podcast.
Building on top of my previous work, I extended it to work with the Instapaper API while maintaining a stellar user experience. All you have to do is save the article to Instapaper and soon a podcast episode will appear in the app of your choice. Every user gets a custom feed URL which they can use to subscribe to episodes.
I’ve been using it over the past few months and it’s worked very well. It benefits a lot from Instapaper’s existing parsing to remove a lot of the fluff around an article, and I’ve made improvements on top of that to ensure it works great through voice.
Seeing how great it’s worked for me, I’ve decided to open it up to more people to start using. As it’s actually a bit costly to use text-to-speech on large amounts of content, this won’t be a free service. The cost is pro-rated, based on the amount of content in each article, along with a small service fee to support continued development.
Since I use Instapaper as my read-later service, that’s the only one currently supported. However, there’s no reason why this couldn’t eventually expand and add more services over time.
Getting Started
You can create an account right now: https://quillcast.app/evening. You just have to link your Instapaper account and register for payments securely through Stripe. Once both of those are set, you’ll see podcast episodes start appearing.
From that dashboard you can also configure a budget by defining the number of articles you want converted a month, or minutes of content, or just a final price. That should eliminate surprises at the end of the month.
I think this service has been great for me, so I hope that more people will sign up and find it helps them too.
